In many companies, paper submission of forms such as invention disclosures are routinely used. Commonly these paper disclosures are mailed to a central location where they are logged into a system and provided to a patent coordinator or the corporate attorney. In large companies having several offices, these invention disclosures are mailed to the patent department or the patent coordinator. The paper systems are burdensome on staff and the disclosure documents may be subject to loss, misplacement or a misrouting error.
Therefore, there is a need to provide a substantially automated invention disclosure submissions process. Various aspects of such a process may be found in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,247,661, 5,276,869, 5,317,683, and 5,377,355. These patents all describe various aspects of a data processing system. One drawback to this system described in these patents is that it is an electronic mail (E-mail) based system. Documents are transmitted back and forth between various locations. The system requires client software on individual user machines. This is particularly cumbersome in a large corporate environment having multiple locations in multiple countries. The drawback being that as migration to new updated software packages is performed, the users in all locations may not have the proper software to access the system. Therefore, certain disclosures may not ever be made due to the inconvenience. The prior patents also describe that the documents are transmitted to each user's machine for processing. Such a system, however, requires high bandwidth to support the exchange of documents from the central location to the user. Such a system, particularly in large corporations, is impractical since large bandwidth allocations for such a system are not desirable ways to use system resources.
It would therefore be desirable to provide an on-line invention disclosure system that does not require high bandwidth for each user to have special software.
Corporate patent departments also typically maintain a docketing system. The docketing system keeps track of the disclosures as they are processed by the patent department. The docketing system maintains the status of disclosures for the patent attorneys and patent coordinators and of any patent applications originating therefrom. Various due dates of the docket system are also tracked. Typically, inventors must call the patent department to determine the status of their invention disclosure because the docket system is inaccessible to them. This process is also time consuming for staff. It would therefore be desirable to provide a system capable of automatically notifying and/or allowing inventors to access some or all of the information in a corporate docketing system so that the status may be readily determined by the inventors.
Typically, invention disclosures are searched prior to preparing a patent application therefrom. Commonly, the disclosures are read and a computer or manual search is performed sometime after the disclosure is submitted. Also, the inventors typically have little input to the process. It would also be desirable to perform a search during the invention disclosure submission process. Consequently, it would also be desirable to allow the inventor to participate or help direct the search.
In paper type systems and in the systems above, one inventor is responsible for preparing the invention disclosure document. It is presumed that concurrence has been achieved between the author of the invention disclosure and the other inventors. Oftentimes this is not achieved and the invention disclosure is processed according to company policies without concurrence. It would therefore be desirable to provide an automated invention disclosure system that does not allow the disclosure to be processed until concurrence has been reached by each of the inventors.